The orange traffic light setting should be tweaked to require face masks indoors in schools, epidemiologist Michael Baker says.
Professor Michael Baker. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The government reviews the traffic light settings on Thursday, having decided last week to keep the country at red.
Health officials would not be looking at a specific number of hospitalisations when advising on whether to move down to the orange setting, but would rather be considering capacity and pressure levels, which also includes staffing at hospitals, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said last week.
In considering a move to orange, Baker told Morning Report there was a need to know where people were getting infected at the moment - whether it was schools, workplaces, hospitality venues or homes - and think about a system to make indoor enviroments safer.
"If we are going to have to live with this virus along with other winter infections like influenza I think we should really think about how to deal with things like ventilation and so on.
"I do get concerned about schools because only 20 percent of our school students are fully vaccinated," he said.
"We should really think about things like ventilation " - University of Otago epidemiologist professor Michael Baker
The orange setting encourages rather than requires mask use for schools and kura, but Baker said masks were an important protection.
"That's really the one barrier we've got in that environment until we can sort out ventilation in schools, for instance.
"That's the kind of tweak we need.
"I'm hoping that's one of the positives that will come out of the pandemic is that we will really address this transmission of viruses over winter, and all the places where this happens, and try and really move to have much safer indoor environments in general."
This could help reduce the approximately 2000 deaths each year from preventable conditions including influenza, he said.
Covid-19 should not be dismissed as a trivial infection for children, Baker said, as it was not yet clear how common or severe long-Covid was in children, or how important a factor their infections were in spreading the virus between households.
Baker said it appeared Covid-19 cases peaked about five weeks ago and hospitalisations about three weeks ago. Though it was too soon to be certain, deaths also seemed to be tracking down, he said.